A friend is in need of a notebook to use for a while so I’ve pulled an old 500MHz PIII from miscellaneous parts I had lying around. There’s no money to spend on software, and he’s not the type to spend money when free alternatives are available. The machine will be used for blogging, writing, playing some media files, and general surfing.
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I’ve just upgraded to Kubuntu 6.10 - actually I did a full reinstall since I hadn’t had much time to use the install I did at the beginning of the summer. This install went a lot smoother than 6.06 did in June. The graphical install worked, and the disk partition tool was able to change the partitions on my disk that already had an XP install on it without any problems.

After the base install was done, I had to spend a couple of hours sorting out a variety of small problems while trying to get to a usable system state. The time spent made me realize just how far Linux is from being accepted at the desktop by average users.

I am surprised to see that basic items like MP3 support still aren’t part of the default install. I understand the licensing concerns, but surely something can be done to solve them. Accessing media on network shares is still problematic, too. A share can be seen, but the media can’t play off it without editing /etc/fstab - try explaining that to a non-technical friend.

When I started configuring the wireless network I found three different tools installed, each of which had a different interface and only one of which could support WPA. In the end the wireless service didn’t get configured because my network card (Broadcom based) wasn’t supported. The system didn’t tell me that either - I remembered from earlier work that the Dell notebooks required extra monkeying around to get wireless working.

Software remains complicated to install, and standard ways of doing things aren’t in place yet. Getting packages I wanted to use required editing the apt configuration files by hand. Even after downloading some packages, the installs failed until I updated the /bin/sh link to point to bash instead of dash.

One area where Linux has simplified things better than Windows is updates. If you stick to using the default package manager for a given distribution, updates for the entire system are simple. There’s no need to connect back to the update service repeatedly (like one must in Windows), or to update individual software packages one by one.

It seems to me that there is too much focus on evangelism and ideals, and too little focus on the actual needs and wants of the average user. Decisions can’t be made simply based on performance, or licenses, or idealistic views of what an OS should be. Usability and consistency are vitally important.

I installed the SARE rule updates channel into a nightly sa-update routine yesterday, and noticed today that the rules didn’t appear to be getting used. I had misread the docs initially it turns out - you must use the updates.spamassassin.org channel if you plan to use any other channels since SA expects to find all rules in one location.

When I tried adding the default channel tonight I was getting the following error tonight while setting up sa-update:

error: GPG validation failed!
The update downloaded successfully, but it was not signed with a trusted GPG
key. Instead, it was signed with the following keys:

24F434CE

Perhaps you need to import the channel's GPG key? For example:

wget http://spamassassin.apache.org/updates/GPG.KEY
gpg --import GPG.KEY

After poking around for a bit I found the last line of the message is misleading - you actually want to run sa-update --import GPG.KEY after downloading it.

I spent the weekend re-configuring the machines in my home office. My primary workstation now runs Linux (Fedora). The XP station is still running, but it is stripped down to a basic machine. I can access it easily enough through rdesktop when I need to use a Windows app, although that’s only been for Nero so far. All data, our twiki site, and this blog has been moved to a new server.

I’ve been aiming to cut over to Linux as my primary work platform for some time. Almost everything I do now is on open source software, so there was little reason to work within Windows. I rarely have need for the standard office type applications anymore, since most business data is now stored within a wiki. My primary use of a wordprocessor is for writing assignment submissions for CGA courses. Spreadsheets still have their use, but OpenOffice.org Calc should do fine. Should I really need to use MS Office, the corporate notebook still has it.

There are some limitations to Linux though. It’s not quite as polished as Windows is, for example, when network browsing and connecting shares, but most of the issues are small. On the other hand I was impressed to see that the printing worked as soon as I plugged in the Brother MFC-8600 to the USB port. All it required me to do was approve the driver the system had selected as being appropriate. Printing was an area I had expected to have to do some manual configuration.

Microsoft makes some great products. Their operating systems are too popular with the virus and worm authors for my liking right now, but they have come a long way in the last few years. Gone are the days of the daily (or more) reboots to keep a workstation stable. MS Office applications, and particularly Excel, are very powerful - too powerful for the average user. Using a $500 suite of software to type letters and create tables is too expensive, especially when equally useful tools are available in the OSS world.